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Less important but might be a good sie note

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If Charles Dickens were alive today, some say, he would be writing soap operas. If TS Eliot were around, on the other hand, with his facility for conjuring up hollow men and zonked-out commuters on the London Underground, he might well be getting zombie screenplays off to his agent. Or if he had given literature a miss and devoted himself to rising through the ranks of Lloyds Bank, he would certainly be investing in these films, because they are now madly popular and a virtual licence to print money. When Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg wrote their outstanding film Shaun of the Dead, it was regarded over here as an excellent comedy with a zombie theme. In the United States, these priorities were switched around: it was accorded full honours as an actual zombie film - but with gags. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Days Later was sniffed at in some quarters over here but in the US it went over like the proverbial gangbusters.

So clearly it is high time for these newcomers to stand respectfully aside and allow another appearance from that maestro of the undead, George A Romero, whose trilogy Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the less admired Day of the Dead (1985) has made him a big enough brand to have his name above the title. His new corpse-opera is entertaining stuff in its distinctively grisly way, and delivers a very high yeeccch-factor, but also has some hilariously clunky moments which channel the spirit of Ed Wood Jr.

The film is set in that trickiest of locales: the post-apocalyptic landscape. Over the opening credits, the catastrophe of zombie-infestation is briskly established. The cutest visual gag comes at the top of the film with a close-up of an old-fashioned sign advertising a diner: Eats. Below this is a shambling community of zombies. One is playing a honking, atonal trombone: thus providing the musical soundtrack to his own awful existence.

They occupy a no-go area adjoining the fiercely protected yuppie-city, horribly called Fiddler's Green, into which the wealthy and powerful have barricaded themselves. The second Untermensch-ghetto is populated by a caste hardly more touchable than the zombies themselves. This is the blue-collar workforce who service the grandees of Fiddler's Green, doing all the dirty menial jobs and incidentally providing the militia who must cull the excess zombie population - the hunters are played by Simon Baker, Asia Argento and the egregious John Leguizamo. Much of the movie's stomach-turning visual invention is channelled into the way the zombies chomp and guzzle and chew. One zombie priest, complete with dog-collar, has a semi-severed head attached by a strip of skin to his neck, which in repose hangs back down between his shoulder-blades; by whiplashing his torso forward he can bring his head up over into position and then forward for a bite. There is a horrible brilliance in the way Romero choreographs this motion and dozens like it.

Ruling over everyone in the rich folks' enclave is the sinister Kaufman, amusingly played by Dennis Hopper: part CEO, part unelected president. He gets the best line in the film when a frowning apparatchik asks if there is any trouble. "In a world where the dead have returned to life," says Hopper thoughtfully, "the word 'trouble' loses much of its meaning."

It is tempting, and enjoyable, to read this movie as a comment on race and class in America: the zombies are leading a kind of unending, futile spartacist uprising against the Wasp rulers in their shopping malls and thousand-dollar suits. On the other hand, the zombies could be a comment on undead America - the cultureless, valueless service-economy drones in their trailer parks and project housing. Satire is admittedly a little undermined by some semi-intentional hilarities of script and performance. Asia Argento is always on the verge of woodenness and it is a dodgy moment when Hopper has to whack an associate, after farcically distracting him by shouting "Look over there!" - and then sorrowfully realises that he didn't have to kill the poor fellow after all. Romero's zombies still have a spring in their shambling step though; there's life in the old corpse yet.
Topics

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If Charles Dickens were alive today, some say, he would be writing soap operas. If TS Eliot were around, on the other hand, with his facility for conjuring up hollow men and zonked-out commuters on the London Underground, he might well be getting zombie screenplays off to his agent.

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Contains information and facts about the film

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Day of the Dead (1985) Trivia on IMDb: Cameos, Mistakes, Spoilers and more...

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Contains lots of facts about the film and it's creation

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Directed by George A. Romero. With Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joseph Pilato, Jarlath Conroy. A small group of military officers and scientists dwell in an underground bunker as the world above is overrun by zombies.

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Contains some slightly interesting facts about the film. Nothing much though.

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Land of the Dead (2005) Trivia on IMDb: Cameos, Mistakes, Spoilers and more...

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Contains lots of interesting facts him on the set and his beliefs about the social climate

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George A. Romero never set out to become a Hollywood figure; by all indications, though, he was very successful. The director of the groundbreaking "...

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Contains some interesting facts about the film

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Dawn of the Dead (1978) Trivia on IMDb: Cameos, Mistakes, Spoilers and more...

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The Time - 10 Questions with George Romero

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The Time - 10 Questions with George Romero

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An interview that discusses his films

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Read the latest stories about photography on Time

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Page that contains facts and infromation about the film and its contents

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Directed by George A. Romero. With Michelle Morgan, Joshua Close, Shawn Roberts, Todd Schroeder. A group of young film students run into real-life zombies while filming a horror movie of their own.

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Contains information and facts about the film

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Directed by George A. Romero. With John Leguizamo, Asia Argento, Simon Baker, Dennis Hopper. The living dead have taken over the world, and the last humans live in a walled city to protect themselves as they come to grips with the situation.

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More infromation about the film

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Directed by George A. Romero. With David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross. Following an ever-growing epidemic of zombies that have risen from the dead, two Philadelphia S.W.A.T. team members, a traffic reporter, and his television executive girlfriend seek refuge in a secluded shopping mall.

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The page about night of the living dead- Cotains casting and filming infromation

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Directed by George A. Romero. With Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman. There is panic throughout the nation as the dead suddenly come back to life. The film follows a group of characters who barricade themselves in an old farmhouse in an attempt to remain safe from these bloodthirsty, flesh-eating monsters.

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Contains a list of all his films and some insight to the director

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George A. Romero, Writer: Land of the Dead. George A. Romero never set out to become a Hollywood figure; by all indications, though, he was very successful. The director of the groundbreaking "Living Dead" films was born February 4, 1940 ,in New York City to Ann (Dvorsky) and Jorge Romero.

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A short interview published in the Scotsman Newpaper

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LIKE the flesh-eaters that tear apart their victims in his groundbreaking zombie films, it seems a lot of people want a piece of George Romero.

* Survival of the dead directed by George Romero. Picture: Complimentary

Or at least they want his name. Last week, a remake of his 1973 cult film The Crazies was released with the boast that it came from the "creator of Dawn of the Dead". Romero, however, was merely an executive producer which, he says, "means they'll call me up when it's finished and invite me to a screening". The irony is that while that film is being sh

Romero changed the face of horror in 1968 with the seminal zombie film, Night of the Living Dead. Shot independently on a shoestring budget in Pittsburgh, the film was raw and uncompromisingly graphic. Daringly for the time, it featured a black actor, Duane Jones, in the lead, whose casual shooting by an all-white posse in the shocking climax seemed to reflect the rifts violently appearing in late-1960s American society.

Though critics such as Roger Ebert damned the movie's gory excesses - "He said, 'This film proves we need some kind of a rating system. How far will a guy go to make a buck?'" Romero chuckles - Night of the Living Dead turned a profit in its first year. "It then went away and I figured it was gone, dead and buried," the director says.

However, its disappearance was only temporary. Thanks to Cahiers du Cinema pronouncing Night of the Living Dead a powerful statement on racism, the film was reappraised by American critics and invited into New York's Museum of Modern Art collection.

Romero says more was read into the film than was actually intended. He and his friends were not, it appears, terribly radical nor particularly politically active: "I don't know if it's not caring or if it's just that we felt all the groundwork had been done and we were just at the right age to benefit from it and take advantage of it."

If Romero had had his way, his first feature wouldn't have even been a horror movie, but a "Bergmanesque" coming-of-age film set in the Dark Ages called Whine of the Fawn. As luck would have it though, the genre fit him perfectly and there is a fiery intensity to much of Night of the Living Dead that still resonates; not least the final 20 minutes, shot like newsreel to reflect the violence and chaos of the time. "That was definitely conscious," Romero says. "But I always thought that I was pushing that a little too far."

Far from Jones's casting being a comment on the divisive issue of race in America, he was chosen simply because he was "the best actor from among our friends", Romero says.

But then, as Romero and his producer were driving the film to New York in search of a distributor, news came over the radio that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. "So all of a sudden the idea that Duane was black gave the film much more weight. But we certainly weren't consciously thinking about that. So a lot of the analysis that I have seen written about the film is, I think, a bit overblown." Even so, its sheer gravity meant that for a long time Romero resisted requests for a sequel. "I thought, 'How can I top that?'"

Yet he could not lay the dead to rest for ever and with support from the Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, and a sudden flash of inspiration after seeing a huge shopping mall under construction in Pennsylvania, Romero eventually returned to the zombie genre with 1978's Dawn of the Dead. More followed, and now Romero, 70, is back with his sixth instalment: the aptly titled Survival of the Dead.

The director insists he is not obsessed with zombies. He just realised while making Dawn of the Dead that he could use the format to "make my own political observations, social observations, criticisms, so forth, whereas if I was trying to make serious films about the same topics, I would have a much more difficult time. So it's become my own franchise, in a way." For this reason it's also the path of least resistance. Which is especially important these days. "I'd love to make another film without zombies. But at my age I don't know if I want to have to get into battles and have to develop something else."

Other recent zombie films, such as 28 Days Later, Dead Snow, Zombieland, and even Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead, have turned the undead into fast-moving attackers, but Romero's can still barely manage more than a shuffle, and in small numbers are more of a nuisance than a life-threatening hazard. The point, Romero explains, is that his films are really about how the living "screw themselves up". "The humans are the important characters. The zombies are almost incidental. They could be a hurricane or any disaster that shakes things up enough and that people don't address properly, or address stupidly."

Thus in Survival of the Dead - an entertaining but awkward mash-up of the classic Western The Big Country and Romero's Dead tropes - two families living on an island turn the zombies into just another excuse to continue an age-old feud. Seamus Muldoon wants to keep them "alive" and is trying to train them to eat animal flesh; his counterpart, Patrick O'Flynn, thinks the dead are better off staying dead.

At first sight this looks like a scenario inspired by the pro-choice/pro-life debate in the United States. But although this was discussed, Romero says he was exercised far more by the general theme of tribalism. "I probably started to think about it because of US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan," he says. "These young guys are going in there and being confronted with these tribal wars, and you're never going to resolve that. I said, 'Gee, that's a pretty universal and much broader theme than I have dealt with before.'"

This makes Survival of the Dead sound rather more serious than it actually is, being possibly the funniest entry in the franchise to date. Romero knows he risks alienating some of his fans but claims he couldn't resist throwing in some "Looney Tune" style "kills" and comedy action sequences.

Romero may be the crowned King of Horror, but Survival of the Dead suggests he may really be its court jester at heart. In fact, he has never been able to take gore seriously: "If I go to a movie and it's particularly violent and people are leaving the theatre ready to vomit, we're sitting there with our popcorn just chuckling."

If this makes Romero sound odd, he says that contrary to what some people might think, he and his pals working in the horror genre are all pretty normal. "I have a very quiet life. There's nothing weird. My film collection is all oldies. I sit around listening to classical music. I don't play video games I love to go to dinner, go on picnics, travel."

Hopefully Romero will at least tell me he has nights where he's racked by terrifying dreams about being torn apart by zombies. Please say it's so. "I've never dreamt about them," he says, disappointingly. "Steve (King] says, 'We don't have nightmares because we give them all to you.' So maybe there's something to that."

&#149 Survival of the Dead is released on DVD on 15 March. The Crazies is in cinemas now.

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Interview: George Romero - Film director

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Survival of the dead directed by George Romero. Picture: Complimentary Or at least they want his name. Last week, a remake of his 1973 cult film The Crazies was released with the boast that it came from the "creator of Dawn of the Dead".

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Short artical about him and his films

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BFI Gothic Season – George A. Romero In Conversation

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Let us open with what can charitably be anointed as a joke – Zombie Lord ‘WHAT DO WE WANT?’, Zombie Horde ‘BRAINS’, Zombie Lord ‘WHEN DO WE WANT ‘EM?’…

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Romero was born in the New York City borough of the Bronx, the son of Ann (Dvorsky) and George Romero, a commercial artist. His mother was Lithuanian and his father moved from Spain to Cuba as a child.

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Wikipedia Artical - Night of the Living Dead

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Wikipedia Artical - Night of the Living Dead

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Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 American independent horror film written, directed, shot and edited by George A. Romero, co-written by John Russo, and starring Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea. The story follows seven people who are trapped in a rural farmhouse in western Pennsylvania, which is besieged by a large and growing group of "living dead" monsters.

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This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Dawn of the Dead. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

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The first edit of the full uncut Night of the Living Dead

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A wrote artical about the orignal Night of the Living Dead film by Bright Lights Film Journal

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Full Comentry of Night of the Living Dead

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Full Comentry of Night of the Living Dead

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Created by James Rolfe of the orignal 1968 version

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Night of the Living Dead (1968) FULL COMMENTARY

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You can view the commentary with the links provided below. Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four